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There’s been a strong backlash to releasing AI models in my community particularly driven by EA and VC rhetoric that the potential risks far outweigh the benefits

This pushback seems quite surprising to me, since the same claims could be made for the internet, social media, YouTube, etc - the very technologies that put this group into power/wealth

My friends/family in India are far more pro-AI than friends in Silicon Valley / EU. And my artist friends seem to be more excited about it than my VC friends

I think subconsciously, a lot of people currently in power seem to be fearful - perhaps because their power/wealth/way of life will be threatened by a faster rate of change. While those in India seem to see universal translation / accessibility of global knowledge as an equalizing force

These are broad generalizations ofc. But it reminds me of the backlash against nuclear power (despite human life cost of oil/gas being way higher than nuclear) or the CEQA/environmental driven opposition to building more housing in California

I don’t know think individuals are ill intentioned in their focus on AI safety, but they sit in an echo chamber where this technology has more potential to harm them (they have a lot to lose) than benefit them (they are already at the top). So it’s natural to feel threatened and galvanize to slow down the rate of change

I tend to be quite dissatisfied by the current state of the world. Lots of violence (humans/animals), oppression, and gatekeeping of knowledge driven by our colonialist history. So I bias towards faster rate of change that could shift balance of power from western military-industrial complex to global south. AI excitement in global south excites me!

This "benefit of all humanity" is a nebulous turn of phrase.

Notice anyone talking that phrase or "AI safety" have no ability to qualify or quantify it?

It's become such an eye roll at this point.

It's interesting that it's all humanity, as if the initial draft was written to benefit a specific subset.

Wait till some nutter with script kiddy skillz uses AI and a drone to create a mechanical murder wasp. And then turns it loose.

humanity is defined as, in this order:

1. myself

2. board

3. investors

4. providers

5. donors

6. high paying customers

7. employees

8. other customers

I don't think that the firing of Sam Altman was due to commercialization of GPT-3 and GPT-4, and I don't think there's been any reliable information that confirms that. There's been multiple statements that at least partially contradict that, including:

Emmett Shear: "Before I took the job, I checked on the reasoning behind the change. The board did not remove Sam over any specific disagreement on safety, their reasoning was completely different from that. I'm not crazy enough to take this job without board support for commercializing our awesome models." [1]

Brad Lightcap: We can say definitively that the board’s decision was not made in response to malfeasance or anything related to our financial, business, safety, or security/privacy practices. This was a breakdown in communication between Sam and the board.” [2]

Also, I believe Adam D'Angelo made some pro-commercialization comments on Twitter earlier this year.

[1] https://twitter.com/eshear/status/1726526112019382275

[2] https://fortune.com/2023/11/19/sam-altman-was-fundraising-fo...

>From the outside-in, I'm having a hard time understanding how commercializing GPT-3 and GPT-4 doesn't "benefit of all humanity". I don't think these models are intelligent or world-changing, but offering an API for people to build on lit a fire under people's asses.

When it's controlled by the powerful, it stands to mainly benefit the powerful that control it. A current example is how they are filtering it. They can restrict answers to specific questions to the public that they themselves have access to.

Because at the moment ChatGPT is in the phase of advertising so you get rather cheap access to a pretty capable model.

As soon as competitors are eliminated,remember Altman's regulation push, and enough people depend on their service they switch to full profit mode including price hikes.

> Altman's regulation pushed

Was "regulate us, don't bother regulating anyone catching up to us, and definitely don't regulate open source AI".

>But on Tuesday, Sam Altman, the chief executive of the San Francisco start-up OpenAI, testified before members of a Senate subcommittee and largely agreed with them on the need to regulate the increasingly powerful A.I. technology being created inside his company and others like Google and Microsoft.

That sounds more like regulate all that catch up to us, so we keep the benefit of experience because we were there first.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/16/technology/openai-altman-...

Same here

>he called for the United States to adopt a licensing and registration regime for AI models “above a crucial threshold of capabilities,” arguing that requiring government approval would help mitigate potential safety concerns.

>The trick, critics say, is where Altman draws that “crucial threshold.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/06/20/openai-ceo-diplomacy-ar...

Let's say it's the 17th century and you've stumbled across a cadre of intimidatingly clever and charming aristocrats who believe that they're on the verge of summoning an ancient Egyptian demon who will either be the salvatation or doom of humanity. It's critical that the ritual be fully understood and correctly performed if salvation is to be acheived and doom is avoided.

These gentlemen then tell you that other groups are almost as near to the summoning as themselves, but that any approach other than their own is reckless and ultimately apocolyptic.

That's the headspace or the serious AI Safety people. Like the 17th century occultists and their work, it's fanatical and zealous and not easily disprovable because it relies on secret, mystified knowledge that outsiders can't possibly conprehend. To them, skepticism only reflects ignorance.

And yeah, it easily looks totally nutso and delusional from the outside, whether they're ultimately right or wrong.

When AI Safety talks go beyond brand protection (don't let Bing play Nazi roleplay) and into existential melodrama, you need to interpret it through this kind of lens.

>>"benefit of all humanity"

because it is not an objective goal, but a subjective one. What I, a libertarian anti-government individualist believes will "benefit of all humanity" is very different from a SanFran based Social Democracy pro-government person, and is very different than Theological Authoritarian from one of the 3 big religions.

This is been one of by big issues with OpenAI from the start, their imposition that their view of what will "benefit of all humanity" was and is clearly politically slanted, and IMO is very dangerous.

Talk about being held to an impossible standard.